Semitic Loanwords in Greek

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Abstract

Commercial contacts between the Semitic Phoenicians and the Indo-European Greeks, starting already in the Mycenaean period, resulted in a number of Semitic loan-words connected mainly with trade in the Greek language. The borrowing of the Phoenician alphabet left its trace not only in the shapes of the letters but also in the Semitic names of 15 Greek letters. It seems that other ancient Semitic languages spoken on the south-western coast of the Mediterranean, e.g. Ugaritic, provided very few loans.